The Summer Triangle

Still not very dark, it was only just obvious that
Mizar is a double with the naked eye. The temperature
was dropping quite a bit and my breath was misting things up quite
a lot (spectecles, eyepieces, etc...).

I guess that the Summer Triangle doesn't get
a mention in many logs (who does log constellations and large
naked-eye asterisms?) but it seemed worth a note because it's
really nice to see this asterism rising before midnight (local
time, UT+1)
again. Ok, so it does mean that darkness is almost non-existent
for me, but it does give that nice feeling that summer is well on
its way.

Izar Almost Occulted by Satellite

While scanning the sky with the naked eye I happened to notice a
rather bright satellite. As I followed its path it was interesting
to watch it almost occult Izar in BoÃ¶tes.
I'm not sure that it actually did occult it from my position, it
came so close that it was hard to tell.

M13

Decided to have a go at looking at M13. Started
out with the binoculars. Located a
reasonably fuzzy looking star forming a shallow triangle shape
with two other stars in about the right location. Working on the
assumption that I'd found M13 I familiarised myself with the field
in the binoculars and then moved onto the
telescope.

Using the 25mm eyepiece I positioned the
telescope on Eta Herculis and then slowly moved the
field to the right location. This took a little time to get right,
I'm still getting used to working out how "push" directions relate
to what movement you see in the eyepiece and, for some reason, I
find this even harder when the object you're looking for is near
the Zenith.

Finally M13 came into the field. With the 25mm eyepiece the first
impression I got was that I was looking at a faint but obvious
"splodge", not unlike looking at a rather faint comet. There was
no hint of any individual stars, just a large cloud-like
structure.

Switched to the 10mm eyepiece. Initially it looked just like it
did in the 25mm eyepiece, only bigger. However, after staring at
it for some time, and using some averted vision, the image seemed
to start to flit from being the cloud-like structure to one of a
large structure made from 1,000s of tightly-packed stars. A really
incredible sight!